The Guardian has published a little online gizmo that lets you decide where you would cut the budget and reduce the deficit. You just click on a department and tell it how much to reduce the budget and you get a bottom line figure showing what you have saved.

I managed to save £76.45bn without too much effort or thought without touching Defence, Education or Health. I daresay ministers have a more intricate and informed method for the cuts they are going to commit to today but it's just a little fun to see what you can save.

I managed to save £76.45bn without too much effort or thought without touching Defence, Education or Health. I daresay ministers have a more intricate and informed method for the cuts they are going to commit to today but it's just a little fun to see what you can save.

I managed to save 185 billion and then had to stop because I was starting to get moist. I was looking for the obvious Guardian exclusions and lo and behold: Apparently, Britain's net contribution to the EU, Commonwealth and other global organisations in their entirety is 180 million per year, not the billions we thought it was, still, even though it's a big fat lie, I zapped it.

I saved £3 billion per annum by getting us the hell out of Afghan too, rightly or wrongly and shut down the payments (7 odd billion) we make to poor countries - after all, we're poor too you know!.

I managed to halve the Treasury budget - after all, it's these cock-ends that keep dropping us in the shit, though try as I might, I couldn't drill down into the House of Commons budget of 450 million to squeeze that!

Still, with my package of reforms, we'll have the deficit cleared in no time, Mrs Brady 'Old Lady' still gets her winter fuel allowance and we'll soon be saving over 30 billion per annum in interest payments which will give us back a bunch of wedge we can then put back into the spending pot.

I only saved over 150Bn but that was because being the guardian, it was slewed whereby one could not cut by 100 percent and in choices the raft of options was limited. eg., percentages of overseas aid.

There have been several articles over the past week in the Times that public spending is actually going to stay fairly close to current levels, it's just going to be shifted around.
What is being cut are the future levels of increased funding that were going to be spent because that additional money isn't there any more (or never was).